Five minutes from the house I grew up in, La Hougue Bie.
6000 years old. One of the oldest man made sites in the world. It responds to the equinox.
Vast stones, hauled from across the far side of the island, arranged as a tomb in cruciate shape. You have to crawl to enter and thus do correct obeisance to whatever was at the heart. The two sides of the cross were tombs. The top of the cross was where the thing of power lay.
The entrance takes the first ray of equinox sun straight in to the heart of the passage. Dawn light hits the thing of power. As the sun rises, the light retreats down the passage back out, pulling whatever power out and into the world, for everyone.
They poured rubble on top in a vast mound and then banked and earthed it well enough that it has stood and stood. The mound would have been carefully judged in terms of height. Likely the top of it would have responded to equinox or perhaps a solstice sunset – perhaps a sacrificial or dedicational place. They plonked a church on it just like they did at Glastonbury Tor, round about the 12th Century. With that there it is hard to fathom the intention from the top, plus there are trees now which have inevitably muddied things even further as keepers who understood the needs would have been pruning them back if they blocked anything. I’d have to stand there on equinox sunset to even start to try and make sense of why it was built to that height, but with the church in the way it’s hard to make sense of the purpose. As Will observed, nothing this considered back then was done at random. The top is as significant as the bottom, but there’s a church that would be thought of as old if it wasn’t basically a child by comparison to the thing it is stealing from. Apparently someone used to “pretend to do miracles in it. I wonder though. That place is full of power. Stuff so old we can barely contain it. Weight and depth. Did he really pretend?
We have this grave leading to the omphalos and *whatever* was housed there for the light to take back into the world as it retreated. The bodies were many and temporary, and were flayed and exposed before going in, and weren’t lain there forever. This was a waypoint. They didn’t want the stink, but the notion of the energy of all the ones who died since the last equinox being pulled out and back into circulation by the equinoctial dawn? I’ll take that as an option. Dry out the dead, bring them to the tomb. At equinox the dawnlight will pull their spirits back leaving nothing but an empty vessel which we can then move on, and grief is dealt with by the hope of that dawn.
It’s so fucking ancient. It is astonishing. And the last two times I was in Jersey it was gated off. I assumed for protecting the monument, but disappointingly it might have been for fucking COVID. Can you imagine? For fuck’s sake… What bollocks.
We got in. We crawled to the centre. Will and Ciara and their little baby.
The air moves in there. Right in the centre there’s a peaceful spider who wouldn’t be there if things weren’t blown in. Maybe we were caught by a similar cosmic spider that needed us to bring it back out into it world. The Gods of this place? We can only speculate what men called them, what they believed them to be. We will never lose the names people gave their gods when writing was better known and preserved. But here we just see how people responded to the sun and the moon. The names we give these powers are always made by men, so in many ways they are irrelevant. Hubris to think we’ve got the right name. The powers are undeniable. The names? I remember doing daimoku with someone and there are prayers at the end. One is for the ancient ones. One is for those more recent who carried the torch. I was hauled out for saying “and now we remember the ones long past”. “No, it says XYZ”. I wasn’t gonna fight mid chant, but the purpose of those prayers is obvious, and it is ancient, modern. If we have to all remember the same list of people every time then we aren’t in a lay Buddhist society, we’re in a cult. The names mean nothing. Just ego stroking. I respect Daisaku Ikeda but he’d be the first to tell me that legacy is not important. It’s about the changes you can make and the energies you can shift, and seeking congratulations just makes you corrupt.
I felt modern in there, taking photos with my phone. But I did.
The museum adjoining the site talks of hoards of gold, deliberately sequestered in Jersey by ancient Celts. The biggest ever one was discovered, and many more. “In the ancient world, Jersey was a place they went to bury their wealth”. That’s psychic geography right there. The function has remained unchanged for millennia.
We drove by the house I grew up in. Maybe they’ve sold it now. On top of a hill, by a dolmen, near that site. They dug a swimming pool. I would like to have just been there to look at the earth they threw away from that dig. How lucky I was to grow up in such a place of power. What were the things that were whispering to me as a child? I still wish I had been able to buy it back for 13.5 million. Next time round.
AlBarclay 